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Damien McDonnell is a visual artist from Katoomba in the Blue Mountains of NSW and has schizoaffective disorder – a bit like having both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder at the same time, he says.
While he feels healthy now, he says in the past his disorder has stopped him from being able to support himself independently.
“It has interfered with some of the relationships I have had with people. For a long time, I closed down and hid from allowing people to get to know me because I felt a bit stigmatised. It’s very difficult to explain that you’re created differently.”
Damien first contacted Neuroscience Research Australia when he saw Prof Cyndi Shannon Weickert on the ABC’s Australian Story in May 2009 talking about her twin brother, who had schizophrenia.
“I empathised with that story,” says Damien. “I was coming out of denial about my illness and I thought, well, wouldn’t it be great if there was something like a cure?”
Damien is now taking part in a drug trial that Prof Cyndi Shannon Weickert and her team hope will reduce some of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and related disorders. These symptoms include difficulty with language, motivation, experiencing emotions and pleasure and the ability to form relationships.
Damien comes in several times for a series of tests, including MRIs and cognitive tests on short-term memory and verbal fluency, to see whether the drug is having an effect.
“I had an MRI today and it was a bit of a ‘Doctor Who’ experience. But I’ve come out of it regenerated. That’s because I am noticing my own progression towards wellbeing and inner harmony and I’m recovering from any sense that I might fall ill again. It’s like a temple of health here,” says Damien.
“I’ve met some wonderful people who really do a lot of work to look after me. This might be one of the times I’ve been happiest in my life.”
Damien says his motivation to be involved with Prof Shannon Weickert’s research comes from witnessing mental illness in others, as well as experiencing it himself.
“I’ve seen the tragedy behind mental illness. Both my mother and sister had schizophrenia. I know a lot of people in the Blue Mountains who suffer mental illness, very much akin to what I’ve been diagnosed with, and they suffer needlessly and could do a lot better.”
“Being here has helped me know the difference between sanity and insanity. That’s proof to me. I’d like that to have a domino effect into the lives of other people who have an illness.”
The CASSI drug trial is based on research by leading schizophrenia researcher, Prof Cyndi Shannon Weickert, who has discovered that people with schizophrenia are more likely to inherit a gene that codes for a faulty oestrogen receptor in the brain.
“With this drug trial, we plan to stimulate the faulty receptor to restore its function. This change in receptor function should lead to improvements in thinking ability, language, memory, motivation, and social skills,” said Prof Shannon Weickert.
The team plans to recruit a total of 88 men and women with schizophrenia aged between 18–50 years.
Participants will take Raloxifene (a drug already used to treat cancer and osteoporosis) in addition to their ongoing medication. Raloxifene stimulates the oestrogen hormone receptor in the brain but does not produce feminising side-effects in males.
The team hope that this drug can be used as a new, add-on therapy for people with schizophrenia.
Find out more about the drug trial
Find out more about Prof Cyndi Shannon Weickert’s work
Read more features and profiles
* Prof Shannon Weickert is the Macquarie Group Foundation Chair of Schizophrenia Research, a joint venture between NeuRA, University of New South Wales, Schizophrenia Research Institute and Macquarie Group Foundation. It is supported by NSW Health.
